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Asked: 2021-07-14 02:32:45 +0800 CST

Exchange 2019 excessive archive size

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I recently set up an internal Exchange 2019 server for a few users that we mainly use for testing. There are only 5 accounts on there, and in one case I imported the users entire existing email backup from PST file. This backup was around 10GB, although it didn't actually import fully as it hit the "TooManyLargeItems" error. I wasn't too fussed about this as I have a PST copy of each users mailbox as an offline archive.

A few days later I enabled the online archive for this user, using all defaults of >2 years on a standalone Archives database. After this I noticed that the Exchange drive was filling up quickly. Within a few days it had grown to 100GB of the 300GB I allocated it. Eventually I realised that it was the Archive database using excess space, and found that the archive for this user is just constantly growing. After a few days it was at 50GB -

Name                     FolderSize                      ItemsInFolder
----                     ----------                      -------------
Top of Information Store 0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Calendar                 124.1 MB (130,100,547 bytes)            10241
Deleted Items            29.06 KB (29,756 bytes)                     3
ExternalContacts         0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Files                    0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Inbox                    22.47 GB (24,125,848,037 bytes)        193193
Sent Items               27.09 GB (29,090,235,340 bytes)        224726
Sync Issues              0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Conflicts                379.5 MB (397,940,955 bytes)             5483
Recoverable Items        0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Calendar Logging         136.1 MB (142,698,692 bytes)            20681
Deletions                2.763 GB (2,967,210,171 bytes)          23899
Purges                   0 B (0 bytes)                               0
Versions                 0 B (0 bytes)                               0

Almost quarter of a million items in Sent and 200k in the Inbox.... This did not seem to stop and I have now been forced to simply disable the archive for this user.

Does anyone have any insight into how a mailbox that should only have <=10GB of email in it total can create a runaway archive like this, or what other methods I could use to understand why it happens?

exchange exchange-2019

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Have you checked the items in the archive mailbox?

    I suppose there should be many duplicate items.

    Below is a Microsoft KB about the similar issue,while it is about Exchange Online:

    Items reappear in a user's mailbox or are duplicated in the archive mailbox when an archiving policy is enabled during IMAP migration

    In this case,would it be possible that the primary mailbox on Exchange server is syncing with some clients?

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